It is hard to imagine how a creature without
language would think, but one may suspect that a world without any kind
of language would insome lvays resemble a world without money—a world in
which actual commodities, rather than metal or paper symbols for the value
of these,would have to be exchanged. How slow andcumbersome the simplest
sale would be, and how impossible the more complex ones! DEREK BICKERTON, Language and Species 1990

Humans have some spectacular abilities, compared to
our closest cousins among the surviving apes—even the apes that share much
of our social intelligence, reassuring touches, and abilities to deceive.
We have a syntactic language capable ofsupporting metaphor and analogical
reasoning. We're alwavs planning ahead, imagining scenarios for the future,
and then choosing in ways that take remote contingencies into account.
We even have music and dance.

What were the steps in transforming a chimpanzee
like creature into a nearly human one?That's a question which is really
central to our humanity. There's no doubt that syntax is what human
levels of intelligence are mostly about—that without syntax we would be
little cleverer than chimpanzees. The neurologist Oliver Sacks's description
of an eleven-year-old deaf boy, reared without sign language for his first
ten years, shows what life is like without syntax:

Joseph saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he
had no problems with perceptual categorization or generalization but he
could not, it seemed, go much beyond this, holcabstract ideas in mind,
reflect, play, plan. He seemed completely literal—unable to juggle images
or hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or figurative
realm.... He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to bestuck in the present,
to be confined to literal and immediate perception, though made aware of
this by a consciousness that no infant could have.

Similar cases also illustrate that any intrinsic
aptitude for language must be developed by practice during early childhood.
Joseph didn't have the opportunity to observe syntax in operation during
his critical years of early childhood: he couldn't hear spoken language,
nor he was ever exposed to the syntax of sign language. There is thought
to be a bioprogram, sometimes called Universal Grammar. It is not the mental
grammar itself (after all, each dialect has a different one) but rather
the predisposition to discover grammars in one's surroundings —indeed,
particular grammars, out of a much larger set of possible ones. To understand
why humans are so intelligent, we need to understand how our ancestors
remodeled the ape's symbolic repertoire and enhanced it by inventing syntax.
Stones and bones are, unfortunately, about all that remain of our
ancestors in the last four million years, not their higher intellectual
abilities. Other species branched off along theway, but they are no longer
around to test.

We have to go back six million years before there
are living species with whom we shared a common ancestor: the nonhominid
branch itself split about three million years ago into the chimpanzee and
the much rarer bonobo (the "chimpanzee of the Pygmies"). If we want a glimpse
at ancestral behaviors, the bonobos are our best chance. They share more
behavioral similarities with humans and they're also much better subjects
for studying language than the chimps that starred in the sixties and seventies
.

Linguists have a bad habit of claiming that anything
lacking syntax isn't language. That, ahem, is like saying that a Gregorian
chant isn't music, merely because it lacks Bach's use ofthe contrapuntal
techniques of stretto, parallel voice leading, and mirror inversions of
themes. Since linguistics confines itself to "Bach and beyond," it has
primarily fallen to the anthropologists, the ethologists, and the comparative
psychologists to be the "musicologists," to grapple with the problem of
what came before syntax. The linguists' traditional putdown of all such
research ("It isn't really language, you know") is a curious category error,
since the object of the research is to understand the antecedents of the
powerful structuring that syntax provides. One occasionally
gets some help from the well-known ontogeny-recapitulates- phylogeny crib,
but human language is acquired so rapidly in early childhood that I suspect
a stream-lining, one that thoroughlv obscures any original staging, rather
as freeways tend to obliterate post roads.

LANGUAGE AQUISITION

The fast track starts in infants with the development
of phoneme boundaries: prototypes become "magnets" that capture variants.
Then there's a pronounced acquisitiveness for new words in the second year,
for inferring patterns of words in the third (kids suddenly start to use
past tense -ed and plural -s with consistency, a generalization that occurs
without a lot of trial and error),and for narratives and fantasy by the
fifth. It is fortunate for us that chimps and bonobos lack such fast-tracking,
because it gives us a chance to see, in their development, the intermediate
stages that were antecedent to our powerful syntax.

Vervet monkeys - chimpanzees: calls

Vervet monkeys in the wild use four different alarm
calls, one for each of their typical predators. They also have other vocalizations
to call the group together. Wild chimpanzees use about three dozen different
vocalizations, each of them, like those of the vervets, meaningful in itself.
A chimp's loud waa-barl is defiant, angry. A soft cough-bark is, surprisingly,
a threat Wraaa mixes fear with curiosity ("Weird stuff, this!") and the
soft huu signifies weirdness without hostility ("What is this stuff?"). If a waa-wraaa-huu is to mean something different
than huu-wraaa- waa, the chimp would have to suspend judgment, ignoring
the standard meanings of each call until the wholestring had been received
and analyzed. This doesn't happen. Combinations are not used for special
meanings. Humans: phonemes - words - phrases - stories

Humans also have about three dozen units of vocalization,
called phonemes—but they're all meaningless! Even most syllables like "ba"
and "ga" are meaningless unless combined with other phonemes to make meaningful
words, like "bat" or "galaxy." Somewhere along the line, our ancestors
strippedmost speech sounds of their meaning. Only the combinationsof sounds
now have meaning: we string together meaningless sounds to make meaningful
words. That's not seen anywhere else in the animal kingdom. Furthermore,
there are strings of strings—such as the wordphrases that make up this
sentence—as if the principle were being repeated on yet another level of
organization. Monkeys and apes may repeat an utterance to intensify its
meaning (as do many human languages, such as Polynesian), but nonhumans
in the wild don't (so far) string together different sounds to create entirely
new meanings.

No one has yet explained how our ancestors got
over the hump of replacing one-sound/one-meaning with a sequential combinatorial
system of meaningless phonemes, but it's probably one of the most important
transitions that happened during ape-to-human evolution.

COMMUNICATIVE ABILITY

Animal communicative ability is very impressive,
but is it language? The term language is used rather loosely bymost people.
First of all, it refers to a particular dialect such asEnglish, Frisian,
and Dutch (and the German of a thousand years ago, from which each was
derived— and, further back, proto-Indo-European). But language also designates
the overarching category of communication systems that are especially elaborate.
Bee researchers use language to describe what they see their subjects doing,
and chimpanzee researchers do the same. At what point do animal symbolic
repertoires become humanlike language? The answer isn't obvious.

Webster's Collegiate Dictionaly offers "a systematic
means of communicating ideas or feelings by use of conventionalized signs,
sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings" as one definition
of language.That would encompass the foregoing examples. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
suggests that the essence of language is "the ability to tell another individual
something he or she did not already know," which, of course, means that
the receiving individual is going to have to use some Piagetian guessing-right
intelligence in constructing a meaning.

But humanlike language? Linguists will immediately
say "No, there are rules!" They will start talking about the rules implied
by mental grammar and questioning whether or not these rules are found
in any of the nonhuman examples. That some animals such as Kanzi can make
use of word order to disambiguate requests does not impress them. The linguist
Ray Jackendoff is more diplomatic than most, but has the same bottom line:

A lot of people have taken the issue to be whether
the apes have language or not, citing definitions and counter-definitions
to support their position. I think this is a silly dispute, often driven
by an interest either in reducing the distance between people and animals
or in maintaining this distance at all costs. In an attempt to be less
doctrinaire, let's ask: do the apes succeed in communicating? Undoubtedly
yes. It even looks as if they succeed in communicating symbolically, which
is pretty impressive. But, going beyond that, it does not look as though
they are capable of constructing a mental grammar that regiments the symbols
coherently. (Again, a matter of degree—maybe there is a little, but nothing
near human capacity.) In short, Universal Grammar, or even something remotely
like it, appears to beexclusively human.

What, if anything, does this dispute about True
Language have to do with intelligence? Judging by what the linguists have
discovered about mental structures and the ape-languageresearchers have
discovered about bonobos inventing rules—quite a lot. Let us start simple.

Subject - object

Some utterances are so simple that fancy rules
aren’t needed to sort out the elements of the message—most requests such
as"banana" and "give" in either sequence get across the message. Simple
association suffices. But suppose there are two nouns in a sentence with
one verb: how do we associate "dog boy bite" in any order? Not much mental
grammar is needed,as boys usually don't bite dogs. But "boy girl touch"
is ambiguous without some rule to help you decide which noun is the actor
and which is the acted upon.

A simple convention can decide this, such as the
subject-verb-object order (SVO) of most declarative sentences in English
("The dog bit the boy") or the SOV of Japanese. In short word phrases,
this boils down to the first noun being the actor—a rule that Kanzi probably
has absorbed from the way that Savage-Rumbaugh usually phrases requests,
such as "Touch the ball to the banana." You can also tag the
words in a phrase in order to designate their role as subject or object,
either with conventionali nflections or by utilizing special forms called
case markings—as when we say "he" to communicate that the person is the
subject of the sentence, but "him" when he is the object of the verb or
preposition. English once had lots of case markings, such as "ye" for subject
and "you" for object, but they now survive mostly in the personal pronouns
and in"who"/"whom.". In highly inflected languages, such markings are extensively
used, making wordorder a minor consideration in identifying the role a
word is intended to play in constructing the mental model of relationships.For us to be able to speak and understand novel
sentences, we have to store in our heads not just the words of our language
but also the patterns of sentences possible in our language. These patterns,
in turn, describe not just patterns of words but also patterns of patterns.

Linguists refer to these patterns as the rules
of language stored in memorv, they refer to the complete collection of
rules as the mental grammar of the language, or grammar for short.
Ray Jackendoff Patterns of the Mind 1994

Simpler ways of generating word collections,
such as pidgins (or my tourist German), are what the linguist Derek Bickerton
calls protolanguage. They don't utilize much in the way of mental rules.
The word association ("boy dog bite") carries the message, perhaps with
some aid from customary word order such as SVO. Linguists would probably
classify the ape language achievements, both comprehension and production,
as protolanguage.

Mental grammar

Children learn a mental grammar by listening to
a language (deaf children by observing sign langllage). They are acquisitive
of associations as well as new words, and one fancy set of associations
constitutes the mental grammar of a particular language. Starting at about
eighteen months of age, children start to figure out the local rules and
eventually begin using them in their own sentences. They may not be able
to describe the parts of speech, or diagram a sentence, but their "languagemachine"
seems to know all about such matters after a year's experience.

This biological tendency to discover and imitate
order is sostrong that deaf playmates may invent their own sign language
("home sign") with inflections, if they aren't properly exposed to one
they can model. Bickerton showed that the children of immigrants invent
a new language—a creole—out of the pidgin protolanguage they hear their
parents speaking. A pidgin is what traders, tourists, and "guest workers"
(and, in the old days, slaves) use to communicate when they don't share
a real language. There's usually a lot of gesturing, and it takes a long
time to say a little, because of all those circumlocutions.

In a proper language with lots of rules (that mental
grammar), you can pack a lot of meaning into a short sentence. Creoles
are indeed proper languages: the children of pidgin speakers take the vocabulary
they hear and create some rulesfor it—a mental grammar. The rules aren't
necessarily any of those they know from simultaneously learning their parents'native
languages. And so a new language emerges, from the mouths of children,
as they quickly describe who did what to whom.